The following passages from one of Jung's later works is pertinent to understanding
the role of the unconscious in spiritual realization and psychological wholeness.

The seat of faith...is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience,
which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God.

Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God,
and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving
in the crowd?

To this question there is a positive answer only when the individual is willing
to fulfill the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If he follows
through his intention, he will not only discover some important truths about himself,
but will also have gained a psychological advantage: he will have succeeded in
deeming himself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interest. He will
have set his hand, as it were, to a declaration, of his own human dignity and
taken the first step towards the foundations of his consciousness -- that is,
towards the unconscious, the only accessible source of religious experience.

This
is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God
or is set up in his place. It is the medium from which the religious experience
seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such an experience may be, the
answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a
transcendental problem.

The religious person enjoys a great advantage when it comes to answering the crucial
question that hangs over our time like a threat: he has a clear idea of the way
his subjective existence is grounded in his relation to "God". I put the word
"God" in quotes in order to indicate that we are dealing with an anthropomorphic
idea whose dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the
unconscious psyche. Anyone who wants to can at least draw near to the source of
such experiences, no matter whether he believes in God or not. Without this
approach it is only in rare cases that we witness those miraculous conversions
of which Paul's Damascus experience is the prototype.

That religious experiences
exist no longer needs proof. But it will always remain doubtful whether what
metaphysics and theology call God and the gods is the real ground of these
experiences. The question is idle, actually, and answers itself by reason of
the subjectively overwhelming numinosity of the experience. Anyone who has had
it is seized by it and therefore not in a position to indulge in fruitless
metaphysical or epistemological speculations. Absolute certainty brings
its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proofs.

( Background )

Instincts...are highly conservative and of extreme antiquity as regards both
their dynamism and their form. Their forms, when represented to the mind, appears as
an image which expresses the nature of the instinctive impulse visually
and concretely, like a picture....

Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinte impulse, since it proves to be attuned
and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance
gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and
hereditary, so too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is
even older and more conservative than the body's form.

These biological considerations naturally apply also to Homo sapiens, who still
remains within the framework of general biology despite the possession of consciousness,
will, and reason. The fact that our conscious activity is rooted in instinct and derives
from it its dynamism, as well as the basic features of its ideational forms, has the
same significance for human psychology as for all other members of the animal kingdom.

Human knowledge consists essentially in the constant adaptation of the primordial
pattern of ideas that were given us 'a priori'. These need certain modifications,
because, in their original form, they are suited to an archaic mode of life, but not
to the demands of a specifically differentiated (modern) environment. If the flow of
instinctive dynamism into our life is to be maintained, as is absolutely necessary
for our existence, then it is imperative that we remold these archetypal forms
into ideas which are adequate to the challenge of the present....

Nothing estranges man more from the ground plan of his instincts than his learning capacity,
which turns out to be a genuine drive toward progressive transformations of
human modes of behavior. It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered
conditions of our existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization
brings. It is also the source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties
occasioned by man's progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his
uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern
with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious. The result is that modern man
can know himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself....

This task is so exacting and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself
in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own
conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly
into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity
progressively replace reality.

Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the
conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith....
In contrast to the subjectivism of the conscious mind, the unconscious is
objective, manifesting itself mainly in the form of contrary feelings,
fantasies, emotions, impulses and dreams, none of which one makes oneself, but which
come upon one objectively.... The religious person, so far as one can judge, stands
directly under the influence of the reaction from the unconscious.

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